So much effort is put into categorizing and analyzing hip-hop. Is underground better than mainstream hip-hop? Is gangsta rap teaching our youth violence and disrespect? Following from Byron Hurt’s documentary, “Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes,” which aired on PBS last week, CNN decided to do their own little special on the issue. The leading question that served as the title of the Paula Zahn special “Hip-Hop: Art or Poison?” pretty much spells out where CNN stood. Paula and the CNN producers may as well have called it : “Let’s Explore the Evil that Is Hip-Hop.”
This approach, by no means exclusive to Zahn and CNN, creates an “us-versus-them” mentality, where hip-hop culture becomes the scapegoat for everything that’s wrong with American culture. This argument (which is really class-based) was made on CNN partly with a stream of select images of hard-core thugs and mainstream rappers contrasted with the educated suit-clad analysts and in interviews by uptight conservative reporters. But as Michael Eric Dyson points out in a segment on women in hip-hop, the objectionable messages of the music (the misogyny, the homophobia, the violence) only mirror the attitudes of American society as a whole.